The Day Kennedy Was Shot (7 page)

In the East Wing—“the female section”—a necklace of offices held ladies who responded to social mail and Mrs. Kennedy's personal mail; here the invitations to White House galas were executed in script; seating arrangements were worked out with the care of a good chess game, and the First Lady's ballroom gowns were on display in half-lifesize renderings. On the second floor, there were some men. Not many, but a few.

This was the Secret Service office of the White House detail. It had a female receptionist, but this was the only concession to the frilly wing of the White House. Inside there were three desks. They were plain and uncluttered, unlike the men who used them. Gerald A. Behn, special agent in charge of the White House detail, sat here to plot the safekeeping of the First and Second Families of the nation with the care someone else might plot their undoing. His work began a full three weeks before each presidential trip.

The moment the President made a commitment to go somewhere, Behn's work was under way. In the case of Dallas, he followed procedure by pulling a PRS (Protective Research Section) file on the city, and this card, in Secret Service headquarters, would list any persons in the area thought to be potentially dangerous. All persons who were psychiatrically homicidal were listed; all cranks who wrote threatening letters; all persons who had been involved in political riots or arrested and detained for political violence.

Every street the President planned to traverse in each city had to be “sanitized” long in advance by agents. Every name on the PRS list had to be checked for whereabouts and security. Every building Mr. Kennedy might step into had to be screened and searched. The day before the President arrived, men had to be posted at every entrance and exit to each of those buildings. Through Chief James J. Rowley of the Secret Service, liaison had to be established with other governmental investigative
agencies, such as the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the CIA so that, if they had any information which might augment the safety of the President, it would go into Jerry Behn's hopper.

The agencies worked well together. So well, in fact, that Chief Rowley often sent some of his Secret Service men to the FBI to take short courses in investigative procedures and the newer and more bizarre devices of detection. In late October 1963, the word that went out from Behn's office was “San Antonio, Houston, Fort Worth, Dallas.” The PRS file didn't have much material. The FBI and the CIA had very little.

The name of Lee Harvey Oswald did not come up. Nor would it. He was a defector who had gone to the Soviet Union and had returned with a wife and child. The State Department had a file on him, but it was a file of insolent correspondence, closing with the department's lending him money to come home. The Navy Department had a short dossier on Lee Harvey Oswald. He was a onetime Marine who, after fleeing to Russia, had been court martialled and his honorable discharge changed to a dishonorable discharge. The young man had protested to the Secretary of the Navy, Mr. John Connally, but the DD was allowed to stand. The FBI was aware of him, but only as a “Marxist” who appeared to be “clean.” He had never attended a Communist Party meeting, never consorted with Reds, never tried to get employment in a sensitive defense area, appeared to have considerable trouble with his marital life, and bounded from one cheap laboring job to another.

Most of the people Behn had to worry about were emotionally disturbed. A history of assassins is a glossary of persons sick and obsessed. Lee Harvey Oswald never got drunk, never wrote threatening letters, and once told his wife that if the President was killed, he would be replaced by another man who “thinks the same and will keep up the same program.”

What worried Gerald Behn was that the Secret Service has no authority over the actions of the President. They had the re
sponsibility but could not make the decisions. Word had already come over the teletype that it was raining in Fort Worth but that Mr. Kennedy did not want the bubbletop on and asked that the Secret Service men remain on the follow-up car. The first part created no anxiety in the White House. The second part did.

President Kennedy was becoming increasingly irritated with the Secret Service. Behn recalled that the Chief Executive had told him, forcefully, to keep his men away from the lead car. On another occasion, in the midst of a motorcade, he had excitedly waved off the men who trotted beside the car. It had reached a stage where Behn and his assistant, Floyd Boring, were no longer popular with the President. He saw them as the leaders of the intruders. Sometimes he almost bumped into an SS man outside his office door. He felt that he was seeing SS men everywhere.

One afternoon, when the President's eyes blurred, he asked to see an ophthalmologist. The Secret Service asked him to please remain in the White House until they could send men to the doctor's office, clean out the waiting room, study the examining room, the doctor, and his nurse, and “sanitize” the sidewalk and the buildings on the opposite side of the street. After all this was done, Kennedy left the South Grounds with a Secret Service car ahead of him and one behind. For the President, it was beyond bearance. At the doctor's office, he had had to sit in the car until the men in the sunglasses nodded to him that it was safe to emerge.

Gerald Behn had been running beside the President's car in Mexico City in June 1962, amid the din of a full-throated Latin welcome, when a “beatnik” broke the police lines and planted himself squarely before the President's car. When he saw that it would not stop, he skirted the fender with a twist of the hip like a matador avoiding horns. As the car passed, the bearded one approached President Kennedy, and Mr. Behn had knocked him down with a punch. The man had been arrested
by the Mexican police and was found to be an American with a police record. The President was angry. He told Mr. Behn that he should not have hit the man.

In a Berlin motorcade, enthused youths broke police lines and the Secret Service agents dropped off the follow-up car to interpose themselves between the President and his admirers. This also incurred presidential wrath. In Seattle, Phoenix, and Bonham, Texas, in November 1961, Mr. Kennedy ordered the Secret Service to stop riding the rear bumpers of his car. Only four days ago, in Tampa, Florida, the President looked over his shoulder and saw Special Agents Donald Lawton and Charles Zboril on the rear steps of his car and he ordered them off. The motorcade was moving too fast, so Floyd Boring radioed the follow-up car and the President's driver to slow down. The Secret Service men got off.

It was not that the President did not appreciate the protection. He didn't want it to be obvious. When he was in a good mood, he said: “Protection is Jim Rowley's job. He has never lost a President yet.” Mr. Kennedy knew as well as the Secret Service did that 100 percent protection is impossible. “Any man who wants to trade his life for mine . . .” The percentage of protection decreases with the daring of the “boss.” If he waves his personal police force away, he hampers its work. If he departs from schedule, or stops the motorcade to shake hands, or leaves a welcoming group to walk along the edge of a crowd shaking hands, or even if he stands still in a street of tall buildings, his percentage of protection drops to the danger point.

Now Gerald Behn had the news from Fort Worth. He could sit at his desk and worry. He could call his Chief and win understanding and sympathy. Or he could proceed with the small tasks of his office, knowing that Mr. Kennedy had always been proved right before, and the Secret Service wrong. Nothing had ever happened to him that could be called dangerous. In a dozen hours, the President would be at the LBJ ranch for a day or two,
and the place was a cinch to secure. It was off the main road, and the entrances and exits were easily sealed. The nearest town, Johnson City, was about fourteen miles away. The two families would rest up, enjoy a Texas barbecue, invite some of the Johnson friends over, then take a plane back to Washington. A simple and safe procedure.

On the wall of Mr. Behn's office hung a framed poem:

The President took a call from the White House. It was Richard Goodwin, an assistant, who said that
The New York Times
was about to write an article about him. Goodwin had told the
Times
“No comment,” but he wanted presidential advice in the matter. Mr. Kennedy ordered his man to go ahead and write a release about him. At the same time, Pamela Turnure, the dark, attractive secretary to Mrs. Kennedy, was issuing a press statement in the name of the First Lady that Texas had turned out to be just as warm and hospitable and friendly as she had always heard. Yesterday had been “a wonderful day.”

The White House press corps was stacked in rooms all over the big U-shaped hotel. The dean, gray-haired Merriman Smith of United Press International, had filed some overnight copy; Seth Kantor made notes that the crowd in the parking lot had started to collect “before dawn.” Charles Roberts of
Newsweek;
Tom Wicker of
The New York Times;
Robert Donovan of the
Los Angeles Times;
Jim Mathis of the
Advance Syndicate;
Jack Bell of the Associated Press; there were correspondents accredited from Washington, from New York, from Fort Worth, Dallas, Chicago, and there were newspaper photographers, television
cameramen, radio and TV reporters, Western Union telegraphers and, in some cases, editors-on-the-scene to correlate the efforts of groups of reporters.

The importance of the press was never underestimated by the Kennedys. The President, having served his apprenticeship as a reporter, understood professional jargon such as “overnight,” “bulldog,” “lead to come,” and “folo-up.” In a manner of speaking, he was his own press secretary. The post was nominally filled by a stout, jolly man named Pierre Salinger, a onetime investigator for the Senate McClellan Committee, whose counsel was Robert Kennedy. The President dealt with the press through Salinger, and the reporters heard only what Mr. Kennedy wanted them to hear, without exposing himself to charges of “managing” the news.

The attitude of the President was that the press, in a real sense, was akin to a fire: it can warm a man, but it can also burn him. At morning conferences, he and Salinger tried to anticipate the questions—especially “the curves”—which might be asked at Salinger's daily briefings. The increasing importance of the press to presidential aspirations is seen in the fact that, in the Woodrow Wilson administration, his personal secretary, Joseph Tumulty, dealt with the newspapers when he was so disposed, whereas in the Kennedy administration, Mr. Salinger, assisted by Malcolm Kilduff and Andrew Hatcher, occupied a suite of White House offices full of researchers and stenographers.

It is possible that the Kennedys (Mrs. Kennedy feared press coverage and especially unflattering photographs of herself) attributed more importance to the press than it deserved. Mr. Kennedy began his Administration by trying to seal the sources of news and information. He demanded that ministers of Cabinet rank and less, even servants in the White House, agree not to take notes and write tracts, magazine articles, or books about their experiences. He also asked bureau and department heads not to write articles of major importance or
make speeches without first submitting the copy to the White House for endorsement.

On the surface, Mr. Kennedy handled the press with urbane wit and a first-name camaraderie. As a minority President, one who had won election by the narrowest of margins, he was aware that he needed the goodwill of these questing men and women who, by the nature of their daily work, had to fear being used by a charming man and his attractive wife. The breakfast speech on this particular morning was of no moment if addressed solely to the 2,000 members of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce and their guests. It must be directed more to the press, which could funnel the words and their import to 180 million Americans outside the area.

Under the surface, the President was chagrined to find that the goodwill of the press had to be solicited anew every day. No warm handshake, no inscribed photograph, no off-the-cuff confidence could keep the press loyal to Kennedy. Their words flogged his hide after the Cuba Bay of Pigs disaster. Their attitude after the Vienna Summit Conference was that the Russians had tweaked the young man's nose. The current trip to Texas was assessed as a two-day whirlwind to sweep up the 25 electoral votes of Texas for the Democratic Party. To Mr. Kennedy, the smiling faces he saw everywhere represented 9.25 percent of the 270 electoral votes required for reelection.

The intraparty fight between Senator Ralph Yarborough and Governor John Connally assumed no great importance in John Kennedy's mind until he read the Texas press. He had been misinformed about the depth of the schism and, when he left the White House yesterday, the President had been certain that a presidential knocking of heads together would settle the dispute and align all Democrats behind him. He was pained to find that Governor Connally had arrogated to himself all arrangements for the trip, and invitations, too. The conservative side of the party, which would never support the President with enthusi
asm, got all the choice seats, while Yarborough's liberal followers, who would and did endorse Kennedy, were cast in the role of pariahs and outcasts.

Kennedy became increasingly irritated. This morning he had read in the Dallas papers that, far from healing the Connally-Yarborough breach, he was widening it. Governor Connally, who had postponed this visit several times because, even though Kennedy had heeded the intercession of Vice-President Lyndon Johnson and appointed Connally, who was Johnson's onetime assistant, as Secretary of the Navy, the Texas Governor was never a “Kennedy man.” As host, he was in the position of a man who could manipulate the luncheons, dinners, and cocktail parties in such a manner that his following sat in the places of honor while Yarborough's liberal wing was either ignored or confined to the back of the hall.